This invention relates to the field of user interfaces for search engines and other information retrieval and presentation systems. Search engines are online or offline applications that receive queries from users or other applications and return search results listing one or more search results including information potentially relevant to the queries. Often, the search results will include hundreds or thousands of different items, such as web pages, electronic documents, and/or data files or data objects, that are potentially relevant to a given query. Users or applications must then evaluate each item to decide whether the item includes some or all of the information desired.
Search engines typically rank items in a search result according to the search engine's estimate of the items relevance to the query, with the most relevant items ranked highest. User interfaces for search engines then present the items in a search result to users with the most relevant or highest ranked items presented first. Typically, the user interfaces for a search engine present only a subset of the items in a search result to users. The number of items in a subset of search results is typically fixed, based on user or search engine preferences. If there are more items in a subset than are capable of being displayed on the user's window or display, then the user must use a scroll function or scroll user interface element to view all of the items in a subset of search results. This increases the time, coordination, and effort required to view and evaluate items in a search results.
If the current subset of items in a search result do not include the desired information, then the user may access one or more additional subsets of items in the search result by selecting a user interface element, such as a forward or reverse arrow or an index number associated with a particular subset. Often, these user interface elements may be located at the bottom of a window or subset of items in the search result. Because of this, a user may have to scroll the window or display to access these user interface elements to select a different subset of items in the search results. This further increases the time, coordination, and effort required to view and evaluate items in a search results.
Additionally, after submitting a search query, a user may want to refine the query to narrow or restrict the search to particular types of information. Typical search engine interfaces require users or applications to identify additional terms or restrictions and manually add these to their previous queries. Often, users may not know which additional terms or restrictions would be the most helpful for narrowing or refining their search queries. This makes searching for information more difficult and time consuming.
Thus, there is an unmet need for a search engine interface that allows users to quickly and easily evaluate subsets of search results. There is also an unmet need for a search engine interface that allows users to quickly and easily select and access different subsets of search engine results. There is also an unmet need for a search engine interface that allows users to easily restrict or refine search queries to obtain relevant items.
In the drawing, the use of identical reference numbers indicates similar or identical components.